Valter Hugo Mãe

THE COMPLEMENTARY POLE, ON DUARTE VITORIA’S PAINTING

Duarte Vitoria has to be a guaranteed name for the art of our days and the days that will come. To follow his work has been the obtaining of an increasing confidence in its passage, made of images without concessions searching for everything but indifference, and indifference is, indeed, what couldn’t be at all waited from this artist, for the undeniable quality and so personal vision of the human being figure . For the new enthusiasm around for the great painting and the timeless art of portraying, Duarte Vitoria is among the young in privileged prominence.

With Polarity accepts, finally, the masculine figure, that very rare he had shown, creating one of the most disturb- ing paintings, exactly the one that gives heading to the exhibition that now is handled. I had the chance to say, in another occasion, that the women of Duarte Vitoria were like fruits decaying on the ground, image that intends to make notice this tragic condition of the body going through time – the ephemeral body –, like something dying con- tinuously. Therefore, this time, the vision widens to the masculine figure, slandering that fury to it which discloses impotent after all before the necessarily fallible flesh. It does not make more than prove what we already thought, that a sexism did not exist in his work, by a misogyny or its opposite, and that what placed on women was put in essence over the human being condition. I believe that the women may seem closer to what concerns the human be- ing, by the vulnerability and expressiveness which are characteristic to them, and the option of portraying them in Duarte Vitoria’s way would pass for this conviction: that the possibility to show the carnal and spiritual subjection of the human being is bigger with the women. But the value of this exposition, especially the great picture “Polar- ity”, is coming to transcend the relation which the artist always kept with his obsessions and prove that the fascina- tion for the human tragedy results in a same fragility before the virile genus, worthy of a same complex pain, made of attraction and deep fear. The man is also, in this exposition, embrace of fury, vigil, pacification or death, placed before us in considerable abandonment to their instincts and innate impulses. Therefore, we see it, in these paint- ings, as various expression of what we all can be.

In a certain sense, Duarte Vitoria searches for the image of man who remains for violence, because the existence by itself is really that. A violence before their freedom, compelling seriously their acts, providing it with a discernment, or a fear, capable of hindering it to commit the absolute escape. In the end, the man, before the frontier of madness, does not have the possibility to result in another thing, so apparently on the reach of their mind, so tempting for en- tire tribes and societies, and at the same time so unreal. The portraits of Duarte Vitoria are catharsis manifestations, from fury to pacification, until death. They are one catharsis of condition, and not a prompt relief merely searched by daily reason. There is a spiritual structure, based in the existence paradigm, which guides this crisis always pre- sented by the painter.

A violent manifestation against the existence such as it verifies itself, deloused of security, defined by extinction. The place dying of Duarte Vitoria, of which I spoke in another time, follows dying, as an inevitable process to which we all are subjected to, clearly measured in the clock of these paintings. With the masculine figure, in the comple- mentary pole to which was accustomed to, the painter works the general assumption of subjection and death, as a complete element without which nothing can be understood nor explained, without which, in fact, nothing can be conceived.